National
One percent of college-aged women in the U.S. have anorexia, while four percent of college-age women in the U.S. have bulimia (Bordo, 2007.) Self-image has been a great impact in the US and it has affected many young girls physically and mentally. Girls report struggling with body image and self-esteem at younger and younger ages and stories abound about bullying around appearance and sexual behavior. Girls’ dissatisfaction manifests around body image, particularly weight, at an alarmingly young age. In New York, over 80 percent of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat. By middle school, 40-70 percent of girls are dissatisfied with two or more parts of their body, and body satisfaction hits rock bottom between the ages of 12 and 15 (nyc project, 2014.) Many women in the United States feel pressured to measure up to a certain social and cultural ideal of beauty, which can lead to poor body image. Women are constantly bombarded with "Barbie Doll-like" images. By presenting an ideal that is so difficult to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of growth and profits (U.S. department of health and human services, 2009.) Self-esteem is commonly thought of as how we feel about ourselves, our appraisal of our own self-worth. But real self-esteem is a complex attribute that has become one of the most misunderstood and misused psychological characteristics of the last 40 years. “Sometime back in the '70s when the "self-esteem movement" started, a bunch of parenting experts said that raising well-adjusted children is all about self-esteem. And I couldn't agree more. This is also when America's self-esteem problem began because parents and other influences on self-esteem (e.g., teachers and coaches) got the wrong messages about self-esteem from those experts. Instead of creating children with true self-esteem, our country has created a generation of children who, for all the appearances of high self-esteem, actually have little regard for themselves” (Taylor, 2010.) The State of California established a task force on self-esteem and social responsibility in 1987. The aim of this body was to determine what connections might exist between these two factors and to suggest policy guidelines relating to the welfare of Californians and to the expenditure of public resources. The book may indeed promote additional research, for the premise that social stability and welfare are largely dependent on the psychological state of a people poses a challenging and provocative counter-emphasis to the assumption that social institutions are the primary determinants of individual welfare (Mecca.) The global and national context is similar because all around the world there’s people that are very self-conscious about the way they look and they go through psychological traumas and their health is put at risk because they don’t want to eat to avoid getting fat. |
National Context
What it means to think globally and act locally is that you should try seeing what are the main big problems occurring all over the world and where you live and if you want to start changing it or making a difference you should try acting up where you live. You should try doing something to change the issue. In the United States, just like every other country you see the issue of self-image. Teenagers and children are being affected by dissatisfaction of self-image. You can see different ads on the television, you see how products being sold have an influence on self-image. Based on an article I read ( Prevalence Funding) “By age 6, girls especially start to express concerns about their own weight or shape. 40-60% of elementary school girls (ages 6-12) are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat. This concern endures through life” (Smolak, 2011). Young girls are starting to worry about how they look and it’s probably because of all the toys that ads are advertising parents to buy. Many young girls have so many toys that are about beauty, and little girls want to be buying them. Like Barbie for example. It shows girls that they have to be really skinny and they have to wear make up to be pretty. “99% of 3- to 10-year-olds in the UnitedStates own at least one Barbie doll...Barbie is so exceptionally thin that her weight and body proportions are not only unattainable but also unhealthy.” ("Does Barbie Make Girls Want to be Thin?The Effect of Experimental Exposure to Images of Dolls on the Body Image of 5- to 8-Year-Old Girls"). Little girls don’t know this but they are still trying to be like Barbie and it’s not healthy, and as the girl keeps getting older and older and they still have the same body (not like Barbie) they become more concerned with their body and get dissatisfied, so they start getting eating disorders. “In the United States, 20 million women suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge eating disorder” (Wade, Keski-Rahkonen, & Hudson, 2011). |